Sawmill Boiler Explosion Kills Assistant Engineer William Welch
A boiler explosion at the Weatherwax Lumber Company claims a life and leaves the community reeling.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
This morning at 7 o'clock, just after the mill of the J. M. Weatherwax Lumber Company started up, a tremendous explosion occurred in the big boiler house. The flues in the pony boiler collapsed, one bursting. The explosion blew off both ends, scattering bricks and debris. Assistant Engineer William Welch, a well-known young man, was missing, and after an hour's search, his body was found, terribly burned, several feet up the draft flue. He had evidently been stooping to close the draft when the vacuum caused by the explosion threw him into the flue.
“He had evidently been stooping and was about to close the draft when the vacuum caused by the explosion apparently caused him to be thrown far into the flue.”
Industrial accidents were a grimly common fact of life in the timber economy of the Pacific Northwest, leaving families with little recourse. This incident captures the extreme physical dangers faced by laborers in the mills that built Seattle.
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